Poets

Chelsea Dingman

Chelsea Dingman is the author of Thaw (University of Georgia Press, 2017), which was selected by Allison Joseph as a winner of the National Poetry Series. She teaches at the University of South Florida and lives in Tampa, Florida.

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By This Poet

Church of the Holy Spirit, Rohatyn 1924
You enter to escape
the cold & find a canvas of St. John,
his hands unsealed
to write. Other icons,
painted in vibrant reds, mounted
on wooden walls’ slick gloss. All white
men, suffering and suffered. Christ,
stripped. His chest: ribbons
of bone. Archangel Michael, Abraham—
young boys again. You ask them about
hunger. How to outrun changing
flags like a child outrunning its name. A war,
past, yet still humming. Your mother
thinks God must be dead, but you ask
the sky to show its hands. For manna
to frost the cemetery’s leaning statues,
forlorn rows. To frost wood, overrun by lifelines
like an old man’s palms. For red
water to spill forth from the Hnyla Lypa
cursing below, its name already lost
on new maps. You search the saints’ eyes
before turning, light ivying
their faces. You think a house can keep
you safe. The bodies, buried. Doors
that won’t spit you out. You search
their hands, empty as spoons. They can’t take away
what you pray. This weight: fist & bone
& wail. In their silence, you hear blood,
as it spins like air through a windmill’s vanes.
As it coppers the chambers, makes them flame.